President Bill Clinton -- Jan. 28, 1997

CLINTON: Good afternoon.

Thank you.

Before I take your questions, I would like to make a brief
statement about the balanced budget that I will send to Congress
next week.

This budget shows that wu can meet two of our most crucial
national priorities at the same time. It proves we can protect
our children from a future burdened by reckless debt even as we
give them the educational opportunities they need to make the
most of the 21st century.

The budget finally moves us beyond the false choices that
have held us back for too long, and shows that we can cut our
debt and invest in our children.

The budget will help to renew our public schools. It will
expand Head Start, help rebuild crumbling classrooms. It will
double funding for public charter schools, giving parents more
choice in how they educate their children.

It will increase funding for Goals 2000 by 26 percent.

And it will help our students to reach high standards and
master the basics of reading, writing, math and science.

It will also enable us to protect -- excuse me -- to connect
our schools and our libraries to the information superhighway.
The budget more than doubles our investment in technology to
hook our children up to computers and the Internet. And it
increases by a third our investment in partnerships with
teachers and industries to develop quality educational
programming and technology.

In short, the budget will connect our children to the best
educational technology in the world.

It will also open the doors of college education wider than
ever before. I'd like to take a minute now simply to outline
our unprecedented commitment to higher education.

With this budget, national support for college education in
the year 2002 will be more than double what it was on the day I
first took office -- going from $24 billion to $58 billion a
year.

The budget will fully pay for a $1,500 a year tuition tax
credit, a HOPE scholarship for the first two years of college,
to make the typical community college affordable for every
American, and to achieve our goal of making two years of college
education as universal as a high school diploma is today.

It will also allow a working family to deduct up to $10,000 a
year for taxes for the cost of any college tuition or job
training. And with our special IRA for education, most parents
will be able to save for college tuition without ever paying a
penny in taxes.

In addition, my balanced budget takes further steps
to widen the circle of educational opportunity. It provides a
25 percent increase in funding for Pell grants, the largest
increase in the maximum scholarship in 20 years, so that over
four million students will get up to $3,000 a year.

We'll make 130,000 more students eligible for these
scholarships. And we will open the scholarships to 218,000
older, low-income Americans who want to go to college.

Second, under the balanced budget we will present, we will
continue to reform our student loan programs to make college
loans easier for students to get and easier to pay back.

We will cut interest rates on loans to students while they're
in school. We will cut loan fees for four million low and
middle-income students in half.

Fees on two-and-half million more will be cut by 25 percent.
Taken together, these two steps will save American families $2.6
billion over five years.

Third, we will increase funding again for work study
positions for students. That will take us over about a
three-year period from 700,000 work-study positions to one
million work-study positions per year.

And it will help us to meet our goal of getting a $100,000 of
those work-study students to participate as tutors in our
initiative to make sure that all of our eight-year-olds can read
independently.

To encourage community service, we will also provide tax-
incentives to encourage loan forgiveness for students who, after
college choose professions that give something back -- people
who use their education to work as teachers in homeless
shelters, as doctors in remote rural areas.

Altogether, these proposals will move us much closer to our
clear national goal -- an America where every eight-year-old can
read, where every 12-year-old can log on to the Internet, where
every 18-year-old can go to college, where all Americans will
have the knowledge they need to meet the challenges of the 21st
century. I am very proud of this budget.

Finally, let me say a word about campaign finance reform. We
all know we need to find a new way to finance our campaigns and
to bring the aggregate spending levels under control.

Anyone who is involved in politics must accept
responsibility for this problem and take responsibility to
repair it. That is true for me and true for others as well.

Last week I met with Senators John McCain and Russ Feingold
and Representatives Chris Shays and Marty Meehan. They have
introduced tough, balanced, credible bipartisan campaign finance
reform legislation. I pledged my support to them. I pledge it
again today. I pledge again to help them pass this legislation.

Any legislation we pass should be bipartisan, should limit
spending and should leave the playing field level between
parties and between incumbents and challengers.

This is our best chance in a generation to give the American
people campaigns that are worthy of the world's oldest
continuous democracy. I call on the members of both parties to
work with us to get the job done. Helen.

QUESTION: What should the American people think of a
presidential campaign in which a day at the White House is sold
for $250,000 a couple and the Republican Party sells a season
ticket of access to Capitol Hill for $250,000?

CLINTON: Well, first let me say I dispute a little bit the
characterization there. I can't speak for the Republicans.
They'll have to speak for themselves. But the people who were
there on the day in question were not charged a fee. Some of
them were our contributors; had contributed in the past -- they
had raised money for me in the past. Some of them had not.

And so I don't think it's quite an accurate characterization.

But I will say this, if you look at the money that
was raised and spent -- not only by the parties and their
respective campaign committees in the Senate and House, but also
by all these independent and apparently independent third-party
committees -- and you look at the exponential cost of the
campaigns that are related to communications, surely we can use
this opportunity to make something positive come out of this.

I mean, I think that all of us, as I said again, I'm -- every
one of us who has participated in this system, even if we did it
because we thought we had to do it to survive or to just keep
up, has to take some responsibility for its excesses. And I
take mine.

But we have got to do something about it. And the only way
we can do anything about it is, is to pass the legislation, the
McCain- Feingold Bill or some acceptable variation thereof.

QUESTION: Mr. President, with all the focus on the
Democratic fund-raising right now, why are you attending a
million-dollar fund- raiser tonight? What kind of -- what kind
of an image do you think this leaves? And why do these donors
make these big-money contributions? What do they get in return?

CLINTON: Well, first of all, under all conceivable campaign
finance reform scenarios, it will still be necessary for the
parties to raise some money. And there is -- neither party has
the capacity to raise all their money from direct-mail campaigns
and contributions of $100 or less.

The Business Council, the group that is having this
fund-raiser tonight, is one that would be quite consistent with
the McCain- Feingold Bill, were it to pass.

And I frankly am very appreciative of the fact that these
folks have been willing to come and help us, and that we have
increased the ranks of, particularly, younger, more
entrepreneurial people in the Democratic Party supporting us.